20 Things You Didn’t Know About The Green Mile

Hollywood has a long and appalling history of playing fast and loose with their adaptations of literary properties, leading to oddly euphemistic credits such as 'based on', 'inspired by', or 'based on a two-line summary of the novel written on the napkin of the hotel in which I pitched it to a bored executive while coked off my ugly face'. One of those may or may not be made up.

Astonishingly, here there are very few important differences between the source material and the adaptation. The time frame of the main story is jigged a little forward to 1935. We never get a description of the crimes that lead to Delacroix' and Bitterbuck's imprisonment. Edgecomb is telling the story in the present day, not writing it, and found out that Wild Bill was the real murderer through a vision he experienced through Coffey, not through detective work.

Aside from that, King's 600-odd page novel is carried to the screen almost completely - an impressive feat of screenwriting at the best of times.